Over the years, the internet has evolved from a simple means of publishing information to a resource-rich multimedia environment. Due to the proliferation of broadband technology in homes and business, opportunities have arisen for providing various types of services over the internet. Some of these services help to streamline global businesses. For example, one type of technology allows people working in offices on opposite sides of the globe to collaborate in a virtual office environment. Such services are generally hosted by one or more servers.
As demand for such services increases, it will become necessary to provide more servers to host the services. Moreover, if the service is provided globally, it may be desirable to scatter the servers to different geographic regions (e.g., one server in the U.S. and one server in Asia) in order to provide greater bandwidth to each respective region. Furthermore, if a region experiences a particularly heavy load, it may also be desirable to further sub-divide that region (e.g., a West Coast U.S. server, a Midwest U.S. server, and an East Coast U.S. server).
Thus, with servers scattered in different geographic locations, it will be desirable to provision the service in such a way that each user of the service is assigned to an appropriate server so that bandwidth and system performance can be optimized.